May 14, 2011

You could say that... if by "a number," you mean 23,850 missing entries and — what? — a quarter million comments!

And those hours offline entailed readers going to my URL and seeing a notice telling them that my blog had been removed from the Blogger system. I have worked for 7.5 years building up a readership, and thousands of people were given the false information that the site no longer exists. I have to hope that they don't take that information seriously and that they try again now that the blog is restored, but that hurt a lot more than if the blog were displayed but not working or if it didn't display but the notice accurately explained that it was only a temporary outage.

98 comments:

Seems to me this would be a good time to explore setting up a blog outside of Blogger. I'd think you have enough readers who would be willing to donate money to pay for hosting and with advertising, you should come out ahead. Best yet, you wouldn't have to deal with Blogger/Google.

+1 to what ThreeSheets said. I know you love Blogger for the convenience, but when Google is picking up the cost of the bandwidth, etc., they don't have to be particularly apologetic about caretaking, it seems to me.

I guess because I knew it was Google (and have had my own Blogger experiences) it was obviously a glitch not related to Ann. Of course I've been here most of the 7.5 years so it was an easy assumption.

I nearly emailed you (Prof. Althouse) at your .edu address but I didn't want to be too forward. I happened to see that someone on a List Serv I am on mentioned that Blogger was down. Before that, I was wondering what happened to Alhouse.com!!

Good thing you are not a "right-wing blogger" or else we would have thought this was politically motivated. After all, wasn't your Wisconsin-Spring-Gets-Frostbit coverage slanted against the people? Not. You were just reporting on stupid.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. (That is the blogger problem. The Wisconsin-Spring people have demonstrated they are both stupid and malicious.)

So Jesus and the Devil were having a programming contest. Just as they came into the last two minutes of the contest, a power spike crashed both computers. The Devil was devastated, he had lost everything. Jesus was calm and cool, knowing everything was going to be fine. As we all know, Jesus saves.

Not trusting Google, when I saw your blog was "removed," I didn't believe it--you are not the type to simply disappear without letting your readers know where you have gone. I kept checking back--and wa-la!--here you are. Oh good. It was a strange day in the interwebz world.

The staff at Blogger have dumped Ann Althouse's blog. If you are one who look forward to their daily dose of commentary, wit, and photography from Althouse and Meade, then like this page and let's put some pressure on them to put it back up.

And other people repeat Ann Althouse's fabrications:Unbelievable! The Wisconsin debacle has poisoned everything. She's not even widely identified as a "right-wing" blogger! But since she was key in the union fight, now she's been targeted by Google. The idea that they'd read her blog and conclude that it's spam is stark raving mad.

So I had most of my archive, and was using the cache approach to try to get to the rest. I was quite time consuming and yesterday was a grueling day. (I sat at my computer almost continuously from 5:30 am until midnight dealing with it and other problems.)

Is anyone writing a history of blogs? I mentioned earlier that Patterico was a contributor to one of the first great blogs called "Oh That Liberal Media". I wonder how many bloggers were inspired to start their own blog by that one or by Insty or DailyKos or Althouse? Someone should research a a geneology of bloggers..how Blogger "C" was spawned by pioneer Blogger "A" etc.

Moving and exporting to a wordpress platform is fairly simple and hosting costs are somewhere around a fancy coffee at starbucks per month.

There are still issues that can pop up there, but they are more in your control. Blogger is cool for what it is, but I think once you get enough revenue out of a blog you actually notice it, you might want to move.

The hardest part of the entire process is training people to use the new address after you've moved.

If we want a better Google - and it certainly needs to improve - we need to raise a stink about this stuff and punish them. Google is the new, bigger and more evil Department of Motor Vehicles. Nothing remains cool if it gets too big. Google is simply too big, and is full of unethical partisan fools.

Customer support was very helpful. They offered to express mail me a new one, at no charge. It would be here in 1-2 days. No, thank you, standard mail will be fine. I can wait the 5-7 days. Is there anything else I can help you with today? Thank you for contacting us, have a good day/

And this was for something that was *my* fault-- me losing my card. I imagine that if it was their fault-- perhaps, they accidentally deactivated my account along with thousands of other cardmembers in some fraud-prevention effort gone awry-- that their customer service effort would have been even higher.

The link Ann highlights here is not based on a factual report. It's an assertion by another blogger. That is all. How does she arrive at that conclusion? She does not say.

So now Ann is fabricating a campaign to get her, involving the labor movement and Google working in concert, even though it's a pretty simple case of a system outage for a massive system that takes a long time to restore.

Ann Althouse, you are using a free service. You're basically mooching off of Google and then, when they have a problem, you lash out at Google, labor, and actually try to get someone fired.

I had somewhat the same problem. My blog has 23,511 posts (though not near as many comments) and I was unable to post anything new to it for over 20 hours. It didn't disappear, thankfully, but I couldn't do anything with it and at this point still haven't gotten back any of the posts from 5-12. It sounds like this was a Google/Blogger problem, but not someone trying to kill our sites.

Time to power up the all-weather, all-terrain attack litigators. I think you need to set up a legal offense fund. Maybe you can turn this into a lucretive, income generating, class-action legal action.

Seems to have been a major Google/Blogger meltdown. I read several Blogger-hosted sites and all have been displaying odd behavior over at least the last 2 days. I think I even saw some odd error messages up to 3 days ago.

I would like to have the power of an unpaid volunteer, who abused his power, to be revoked.

I further think that any company that hires him or brings him in under contract to work on their information technology systems are making a bad hire. An attitude of good customer service is mandatory to be a truly effective IT professional.

I sincerely hope you can restore all of your previous posts..... and comments. The community interaction is one of the things that drew me to your blog in the first place. It would be a shame to have lost that history as well.

The ability to allow people who have ill will towards you to mark your blog as spam and then have you silenced because they don't agree with some of your posts or coverage of political events is very frightening and wrong.

Because you are an "important" blogger and have the support of other "important" bloggers you were able to get some resolution and restoration.

Think of all the "little" and powerless bloggers who continually suffer the same targeted treatment.

And NOW the Congress is considering giving the President and other politically motivated despots a kill switch for the internet. How handy when people disagree with you politically or you don't want information to be disseminated, you can just flip the kill switch.

"i had somewhat the same problem. My blog has 23,511 posts (though not near as many comments) and I was unable to post anything new to it for over 20 hours. It didn't disappear, thankfully, but I couldn't do anything with it and at this point still haven't gotten back any of the posts from 5-12. It sounds like this was a Google/Blogger problem, but not someone trying to kill our sites."

But your blog didn't disappear, replaced by a "removed" notice, did it? I understood the general Blogger problem (or I'd have been much more upset), but what happened to me was different. I had no way to know if it was connected or a coincidence. My post at the Google forum *assumed* it was connected, but I still had to deal with was was a *different* problem. Since it *coincided* with some severe antagonism I was getting from real people, I speculated about what could have happened to get my blog flagged.

And my blog is *still* missing the whole archive of old posts, not just the ones that were published in the last few days (which was what Google's press releases talked about).

I'd say you are getting your money's worth from Blogger, and then some. It always amazes me how people (like you Ann) with the drive and ability to make a blog like this happen will abdicate ultimate control of the mechanics. You're well connected in the blog-verse so you have to have scads of good advice falling in the door right now.

My use of Blogger isn't about cheapness, as I've explained before. I actually like it and have trusted it. I don't trust the smaller businesses I'd have to deal with if I went looking for a different place.

If you think because it's free, Google can do anything, then we are all royally fucked.

Ann, I will be very disappointed if within the next month or so we do not see you migrating to a more secure blogging environment.

Google has a well known political bent and from this experience it is clear that those whose views run counter to it are vulnerable to the loss of their site and to be subject to abuse and harassment by Google employees and/or representatives.

If your blog is something that you value (and I suspect that it is) I encourage you to see to its safety. It is only a matter of time before the apparatchiks at Google decide that they can do without the aggravation of supporting your blog.

I once had an airman respond to my frustration about a lack of customer service when trying to figure out how to navigate the new health insurance model (instead of dependents seeing military doctors, you took them to a civilian hospital and charged your insurance like normal people do) set up for civilian dependents with "It's free."

It wasn't FREE it was part of my regular compensation. Part of my pay.

This is certainly one of the reasons that the mere notion of free government health care gives me a rash.

Google isn't providing a service for nothing either. This is not a Charity.

Sure, if you are given a gift it's really rude to fuss that it's not the right color or not exactly what you wanted. But this isn't a gift. It's a business.

Google Reader has a cache of all the blog posts going back at least to 2010- perhaps all the way to the beginning. They're all still there.

Comments aren't included. Reader would only have cached those if someone had subscribed to that thread via Reader.

(Hopefully Reader won't update that cache in a way that erases info.)

As has been pointed out elsewhere, Google just unveiled its cloud-only Chromebook OS & hardware, which has the built-in assumption that you can trust Google with your info- free or paid. Not good timing.

Professor Alhouse, it may be because I'm not all that bright, or because I haven't been following the story very closely at all, but are you back where you were BEFORE Google/Blogger declared your bog as "gone"?!?

Here is a post from an ideological fellow traveller of Althouse, where he updates and concludes:

Update: Via Instapundit I see that Althouse’s problems appear to be with Google itself. Althouse is blogging at an alternative site: Althouse2. Apparently, Ann suspects politics. While I can understand her frustration at her site disappearing, I must confess I have a hard time thinking Google is out to get her. This all comes full circle to my intro to this post: there are reasons to pay for one’s own hosting.

Update 2: After reading the whole help thread, I must confess: one does get what one pays for and Blogger is, well, free.

Alpha -- Awaiting your rebuttal to Ann's suggestion that she could sue you for defamation for claiming she started the FB page. Just love the hypocrisy of you running around here trying to smack down theories of what happened with hysterical indignation, then get caught in a flat out lie. Hoisted by your own petard.

The same message appeared when my blog encountered technical difficulties.

I'm not convinced that Google targeted this blog. Screwing up with a high-traffic blog is probably the last thing they want to do. As others have mentioned, this puts a ding in their efforts to market their cloud-based services.

Despite the problems, I would continue to use Blogger. For the most part, Google does a good job of keeping things going smoothly. They likely won't be bought out, and will continue to develop and create new and better ways of connecting all the technical components they offer. Google is generally reliable.

If they're smart, they will address the way Althouse was treated, and use what happened to her to improve their volunteers and the way they give out and take in information.

Regardless - I've started the export to Wordpress as a back up/Emergency Preparedness Plan anyway.

I'm not looking forward to it, I don't find Wordpress's set ups to be as user friendly, though many friends assure me otherwise. I'll learn. I kinda think it is like a Mac/PC thing - it seems to me Blogger is more Mac and Wordpress is more PC...

Dang - I really did have other things to do today. :)

And while we are at it - can anyone recommend a good BOOK/manual for blog set up and social media (Facebook and Twitter) - a comprehensive guide that you can open up to a page rather than going through a million searches and posts to find an answer?

Did Ann Althouse not create the page to save her blog? If so, my bad. It was not clear given the evidence.

Althouse has the second post up there, one hour after the first, not correcting this claim from the page author:

"Save Ann Althouse's BlogThe staff at Blogger have dumped Ann Althouse's blog. If you are one who look forward to their daily dose of commentary, wit, and photography from Althouse and Meade, then like this page and let's put some pressure on them to put it back up.21 hours ago"

So, it may not have been her. No problem admitting that point.

That changes that one narrow point. The claim of persecution is still bizarre.

@Alpha LiberalGiven that the Blogger message indicated that Ann's Blog ha been pulled because of a spam alert and given that someone had recently and successfully had Crack Emcee's blog pulled and not knowing Blogger's the protocol for restoring service (what if a spam complaint or more existed and those blogs were going to be returned last) I don't think AA's frustration or suspicion was unfounded. Add to that the posts by nitecruzr/Little Cartman and I think it was very reasonable.wv: tonect-when using the right tone to connect with someone for effective communication which Little Cartman failed to do.

I have to hope that they don't take that information seriously and that they try again now that the blog is restored

Of course we didn't.

Geez, I'm sure you didn't mean that as an insult, but that really does hurt.

I knew the minute I saw that message that Google had F'ed up. And here is what I said to myself:

Self! I'm going to click on Althouse's URL every hour for the next 12 hours. And then for the next 12 hours I'm going to click on Althouse's URL for every 2 hours. And my guess is that the blog will be back in a day or so.

And look! It worked.

Loyal readers don't bolt at the first sign of an idiotic Google error message. They patiently keep clicking and waiting, clicking and waiting.

Now, if I had clicked on Andrew Sullivan's URL (and I would not because I am making a serious effort these days to avoid consuming filth) and it said his blog was gone? Now for that, I would have done a little happy dance.

Maybe not the big happy dance I did when the news about dead Osama arrived. But a little happy dance nonetheless.

"Still not sure why a 'helper' would assume the althouse blog was deleted for spam, rather than being one of those affected by the outages."

I know! My original post there *assumed* it was connected to the outage. Then nitecruzr assumed spam, maybe because of the "removal" notice that had replaced my blog. Now, people like Alpha criticize me for speculating about who might have flagged my blog as spam. Try to add that up.

The take down of your blog may turn out to be from an innocent error. However, the treatment you received at the hands of Google representatives was not. If you remain on blogger you will only justify their treatment of you. You show them that there are no consequences for treating you poorly and that, while they may acquiesce to your demands that they reinstate your blog, they can be as demeaning and rude as they please.

Having read the full thread from Patterico I would not remain with blogger if I could avoid it.

Well, Ann and her minions want to get some Google tech support person fired.

Obviously, Alpha doesn't understand the concept of customer service in private enterprise, probably because he has no experience in private enterprise.

When a rep is abusive and does little, if anything to help, the aggrieved customer is entitled to ask for some satisfaction.

Obviously, Alpha thinks all businesses can be run by public sector unions, where no one ever gets fired, regardless of how poor a job they do.

PS Note, please, Alpha, who blows any news item he can find where some Lefty is discomfited (and who rails against "torture" in the pursuit of national security) into evidence of Tea Party violence and Conservative conspiracy, is telling everyone else, "Nothing here. Move along".

Keep in mind that Blogger has never really updated their antiquated commenting Go here and marvel at how the comments can be collapsed, there's shortcut buttons for basic code, new comments noted and highlighted, the awesome z button to skip to the next new comment, the ability to mark all comments as read.

Implementing such a system Blogger-wide would require very little outlay.

Well, imagine that. "Something for nothing" turns out to be "not free".

I should know better.The Google-borg has all my personal email & many of my photographs.Seemed like a good deal a few years back - allow the borg to scan my email & gawk at my stupid photos in exchange for nearly unlimited storage & access from anywhere.

Thought I was dealing with a legitimate entity. Who would have thought that one would need to kiss "nitecruzr's" ring to get to someone who could take action?

Lesson learned. Pay for what's important. I'll buy an Althouse totebag & an extra coffee mug if that helps you out with the hosting thing.

I suppose some dickless volunteer is now going to queer my gmail account.